


summer on the road

by maplemood



Category: Paterson (2016)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, POV Second Person, Pregnancy, Road Trips, Slice of Life, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 13:58:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13812633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: If the sky tastes like anything, it tastes like blue raspberry; it tastes like your wife’s kisses.





	summer on the road

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [only when spring comes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13509951) by [TolkienGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl). 



> As you can see, this fic was inspired by TolkienGirl's wonderful story, which I periodically have an almighty need to reread. I hope you enjoy!

Halfway through Pennsylvania, Marvin begins to whine. You’ve already flipped on your blinker, already pulled over into the browning grass, when Laura winces, stretches.

“Me too, darling.”

…

Half-lost down a tangle of back roads that is the most of Pennsylvania either of you has ever seen, you breathe in deep and think that if this sky, flat and cloud-swirled blue, tastes like anything, it must be popsicles. The mini-cooler jammed under Laura’s feet is full of them, lemon and strawberry and orange and peach, but she’s been sucking only one flavor since you drove out of Paterson. Blue raspberry. If the sky tastes like anything, it tastes like blue raspberry; it tastes like your wife’s kisses.

Once you set him down Marvin snuffles into the grass and lifts his leg, peeing into a patch of Queen Anne’s lace. Laura grasps your arms as she crouches, her underpants around her ankles and her zebra-striped skirt hiked up to her waist.

“I’m sorry, honey.” Her face is a little puffy, a little tired—she never says so but you know it upsets her that she can’t balance so well anymore. “The next one I’m holding until Ohio, I swear it.”

“Hey.” You shake your head. “Wouldn’t want you to pop.”

Laura laughs, glances down at her stomach. “I think I am already popping.”

You shift your feet, gripping her arms tighter to hold her steady. “But maybe we should get back on the highway, you know? For the rest stops. And the stores. You could get another pillow for your back.”

Marvin’s commandeered the pillow she did bring. He snores on it in the backseat, and Laura doesn’t have the heart to say no to him, any more than you have the heart to say no to Laura.  

“I could.” She tugs up her underwear, and you help her to her feet. Sunlight glitters in the slick of sweat under Laura’s nose. “But—” she throws an arm out, to the road, to the foam of Queen Anne’s lace, to the popsicle-cool sky. “Then we wouldn’t have all this.”

“No,” you say. “I guess not.”

Laura leans into you, heavily. You wrap your arm around her waist.

“Ohio,” she says, eyes on Marvin, who’s grumbling at something in the weeds. “Can we get on the highway in Ohio?”

You’ve never been down this road, and you have a full week to get where you’re supposed to be going.

“Sure,” you say. “Why not?”

…

Your notebook is packed in the trunk beside Laura’s laptop and Marvin’s crate. Your mind wanders back to it as you pass entrance ramps and exit ramps, neighborhoods and towns, supermarkets and liquor stores. Lines pass, too, odd words and phrases, but this route is new to you; the poems will come, you think, once you’re home. When you can look back.

You have family in Peoria. Laura has family in Pasadena. A plane would be faster, a bus would be better for the environment. Neither one of you has been on a cross-country roadtrip before, though, and in three months it’s unlikely you’ll have the time for one, or the energy.

Laura stares out the window, one arm resting across the swell of her stomach. She’s waiting to be surprised, like you. But lately she seems sure the baby will be a girl.

“I was thinking...we should name her after a poet, shouldn’t we? Emily, Sylvia, Elinor...so many beautiful little girl names.”

“Mmm,” you say. A blue van cuts in front of you. “Sylvia Elinor. Or Elinor Emily.”

“Sylvia Elinor,” Laura repeats carefully, tasting the sound. “Oh, honey, that’s perfect!”

Warmth spreads through your chest and you risk a quick glance at her belly. “Sylvia Elinor.” It already sounds like a real person. Just a little. “What do you think of that?”

“She loves it.” Laura reaches for the backseat to tousle at Marvin’s head. “Or she will. It sounds classic, yes? But not boring. You know, I’ve always thought Laura sounded a little boring.”

Laura, who holds whole worlds inside herself. “Not to me.”

“Not to her, either?”

The windows are cranked down. Warm wind dries the sweat off both your faces, blows away the smell of Marvin’s belches. “No, not to her.”

…

“—And there it was, film and all. Five dollars! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Can I see the picture again?” you ask. “That one.”

It’s one of the three polaroids Laura took at your aunt’s house in Peoria, almost right after discovering the camera at a yard sale. There you are, unaware, face turned away (though it catches the outline of your nose, of course, and the jut of one ear). You don’t look at yourself long; your cousin’s youngest rides on your shoulders. Your hands circle her ankles and her chin rests on your head. She looks solemn.

“You’ve got a knack for these,” you say, tapping a finger to her face. “She looks great.”

“So do you, hiding your face like that. Very dashing. Very mysterious.” Laura hooks Marvin’s leash to his collar. “I’m going to run a bath, okay?”

Later, after you’ve walked Marvin around the motel parking lot twice and assured the owner he’s not a chewer twice (Marvin growls, which doesn’t help his case), you find her still in the bath, cupping a polished conch shell in her hands. It’s another yard sale find.

“Which word do you like better?” she asks. “Ocean or sea?”

“Hmm. Sea, I guess?” You brush wet curls off the back of her neck.

Laura closes her eyes. “Me too. Sea’s more old-fashioned, but it sounds bigger, doesn’t it? Even though the word is shorter.” She sighs. “My mother said she’ll take us to the pier at Santa Monica. The Santa Monica Pier. It’s over a hundred years old.”

“I didn’t know that,” you say.

“It would make a good poem.”

“I think you’re right.”

“I miss the sea,” Laura whispers.

She slumps, her back to the tiled wall, her belly level with the tub’s edge. After a minute you bend, laying your cheek against her. You feel a flutter, then more: a kick with the force of a small, but strong, punch.

You close your eyes. “I think she would make a good poem.”

Laura drops her conch shell into the bath and cards her fingers through your hair.

…

Most nights she doesn’t sleep well. So neither do you, and neither does Marvin, who now sits at the edge of the strange motel bed, whining uneasily.

“It’s okay,” you tell him. But Marvin, of course, doesn’t believe you.

Laura paces. “Just turn off the light,” she tells you. “Don’t let me keep you awake.”

“This isn’t our bed. I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway,” you say. It’s not a lie.

“But you have to drive tomorrow.”

“Okay. I’ll turn it off in a minute.”

“A minute.” She sits on the edge of the bed. She pets Marvin. She gets up.

“What if I won’t be a good mother?”

“Honey,” you say. Her hair is damp but wild, her face troubled in a way you wish you could smooth over but know you can’t. “You’ll make a wonderful mother.”

“Sometimes I don’t think so.”

“Like tonight?”

“Yes. Like tonight.” She drops down beside you, her nightgown billowing out as if it’s blooming. “Don’t you ever worry—” her voice catches. “—do you ever think you won’t be a good father?”

You gather Laura to yourself, as much of her as you can. Her arms wind around you, her hair tickles your chin. “All the time.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she says, and the catch sounds more like a laugh, this time, “You can’t be right. Obviously.”

You kiss her hair. You kiss her shoulders, the soft hollow of her throat. “Obviously.”

…

 _All the time._ That’s not a lie, either. You drive a bus. Laura helps manage a farmer’s market. You live in a tiny house with an unfriendly dog and this trip alone is burning through more money than either of you care to think about, though Laura worked out the itinerary so you’d spend as little as possible.

These are the parents your daughter will have. Laura can make castles out of cardboard boxes, pirate treasure out of bottle caps. She can sing the baby to sleep with “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain”.

But you?

You don’t sing much. You don’t do much.

You don’t even have a cell phone.

Will you like the kind of father you turn out to be?

Will she?

…

Pasadena, Laura says, is beautiful. The Santa Monica Pier is sublime.

Her mother snaps a picture of the two of you backed by the candy-colored whirl of the Ferris Wheel. The day you go is blue, salty, and cloudless, the kind that fizzes beneath your skin and leaves you happy and starving. You eat corn dogs and fries and onion rings, dipped in ketchup and crisp with grease. Laura feeds a bite of hers to Marvin, who belches and barks at the gulls.

Waves swirl under the boards at your feet, brown-green. Later, you walk on the beach, arms linked, on sand wet and smoothed slick by the tide.

“Our baby will love the beach.”

“She’ll definitely love corn dogs,” you say.

Laura smacks your arm. “You’ll love me,” she says, “even if I eat a hundred corn dogs?”

“Of course.”

“And gain a hundred pounds?”

“I’ll always love you.”

She squeezes your hand. “Oh, darling. And I'll return the favor.”

Evening light stretches her shadow almost as tall as yours. The light she says is the color of orange sherbert or dandelion wine. Laura should be the poet. She could be, if she didn’t always insist you have a better way with words.

“You shouldn’t pay so much attention to me. All I say are silly things.”

Now, she says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Marvin yanks at his leash. “Could be,” you answer, reeling him back in.

Laura lifts her skirt up as the waves foam around her ankles. “This has been one of the best days of my life,” she says. “Now...now I’m ready to go home.”

…

Back home, she sets the conch shell and the Santa Monica polaroid on your desk. “Do you mind? I thought you’d like something new to look at while you work on your poems, but I can put them somewhere else.”

“No.” You go to drive your normal route tomorrow. Weariness creaks in your bones, but so do words, and so does Laura’s smile. “They’re perfect.”

You open your notebook, fold it to a clean page. You think about how you could still smell sea salt and corn dogs in Laura’s hair last night, how her belly pressed against yours when you drew her close.

You think about your daughter, and the songs Laura will sing to her.

You don’t sing much.  

_I think she would make a good poem._

You tap your pencil on your desk. Once. Twice.

You begin to write.

**Author's Note:**

> 1.) I played fast and loose with the logistics/timeline of the road trip, but [here](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Paterson,+NJ/Pasadena,+CA/@40.2425641,-104.8867018,4z/data=!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x89c2fc3469054281:0xbecad160c7fb24da!2m2!1d-74.171811!2d40.9167654!1m5!1m1!1s0x80c2c2dc38330b51:0x52b41161ad18f4a!2m2!1d-118.1445155!2d34.1477849) is a route close to what Laura and Paterson follow, as plotted by Google Maps. 
> 
> 2.) Laura is at the tail end of her second trimester (otherwise known as the best time for pregnant women to travel, apparently) and around six months pregnant.
> 
> 3.) Sylvia for Sylvia Plath, Emily for Emily Dickinson, and Elinor for Elinor Wylie. Elinor Wylie's poetry probably wouldn't be quite to Paterson's taste, but I feel like Laura, on the other hand, would adore her.


End file.
